HOLLYWOOD — The public library shut its reading room the week before winter break, and by the second week of January my small school library had quietly inherited the overflow.
I have run the library at a middle school near the branch for eleven years. It is one room, a good one, with tall windows and more chairs than a middle school library has any business owning, which has turned out to be lucky. When the reading room down the street went dark for its retrofit, a certain kind of student began appearing at my door in the afternoons — some I teach, some I have never had in a class, a few clearly too old for my school, older brothers and sisters who used to walk the younger ones to the public room and stay to study themselves.
They ask the same thing, more or less. Can I stay. Can I sit here until you close. Is it all right if I just do my homework. It is always all right. I keep the room open as late as the custodian and my own patience allow, which some nights is later than I should, because I know what the question is really asking. It is not asking for a library. It is asking for a table, a quiet hour, and a door that does not have four other people’s evening behind it.
I want to be careful here, because I am not against the retrofit. The engineers say the reading room could not survive a serious quake as it stood, and a room that might come down on a child’s head is not a room anyone should defend. What nobody planned for, as far as I can see, is the in-between. A public building closes for “several months,” the months stretch, and the people who quietly depended on it are told, in effect, to make other arrangements. For a good number of my students, the other arrangement is me.
There is a boy who comes most days and reads at the same seat by the window, the way you return to a chair a room has trained you to think of as yours. He had that chair at the public reading room. He told me once, not looking up, that it was easier to think there because nobody at home ever needed the reading room for anything else. I have turned that sentence over for weeks. A quiet public room is the one thing some children own without paying for it, and when you close it you do not close it to no one. You close it to him.
The reading room will reopen. The bond passed, the work is real, and one day the tall doors will swing back and the good light will pour in and this will read like a fuss over an interruption. I only hope the people who set the timeline understand that the interruption has a face, and that it has spent a school year at a borrowed table in my room, getting its homework done anyway.